...spreading personal data as willingly as Peter Pan steals Lost Boys from their cribs...

It is so important to know where your information is going in this digitally social day and age. Everywhere you click is monitored, everywhere you go is recorded, and even when you are unaware, you are on camera from some angle or another. Did you know the Google nest system even has a built-in microphone, unbeknownst to its users, that can (and does,) record and store household conversations? Shoshana Zuboff has expressed her concern for growing capitalistic surveillance in the following video.

Check it out and come back to this…

https://youtu.be/hIXhnWUmMvw

Mind blown, am I right?

Learning how PokemonGo originated from the CIA's Project Keyhole was incredibly eye opening to me. They mask this defensive technology under the cloak of a family fun game that you can play with your kids. However, while you are catching Pickachu - they are catching all of your most secure information and biometrics, and every location that you stop along the way. They are storing this data for whatever use they deem fit.

It’s scary.

But, even more scary than that - the microphone absent from Google Nest schematics. Though I already touched on this slightly above, I think the omission warrants a reminder. When asked about it they apologized and said, "The on-device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have been listed in the tech specs. That was an error on our part,” but this sounds like a bit of a cop-out if you ask me. Especially when you pair it with the knowledge that, if you refuse to sign their privacy agreements, (allowing them to sell your information to the highest bidder,) they stop allowing functions on your device to work. Virtually demanding that you allow yourself to be recorded at all times.

But it is not just Goggle and their Nest we need to be worried about. Every privacy policy we sign is allowing another company full rights to our information. I know that I am not alone in just clicking through the “Yes, I accept,” buttons - just to get my new app or website going. The instant gratification is worth more than reading through the policies.

Take for instance all of the recent Facebook data privacy scandals. In just the last two years Facebook and its parent company, Meta, have been a major part of more than two dozen lawsuits focusing on illegal data and privacy issues. The most recent of which “Facebook parent company Meta has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a class-action lawsuit claiming it improperly shared users' information with Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm used by the Trump campaign.” This information leaked in this particular instance was that of 87 million people.

The saddest part of this inevitable issue is that the youngest generations do not even know a world in which they were not under constant surveillance. It has become so normalized, and commonplace that it is not a concern for them at all. Meanwhile, they are walking around with massive targets on their backs - as they hop from platform to platform ; spreading their personal data as willingly as Peter Pan steals Lost Boys from their cribs.

My suggestion to anyone trying to protect themselves and their security is to always change your passwords regularly, and use a Duo-Authentication - even if it is annoying to have to login twice - and ALWAYS read the small print in the Privacy Policy.

My next post will be a deep dive into where my data goes on a daily basis … Check back to learn how easy it is to spread data, even for someone as cautious about it as myself.